Rather than becoming a Hadoop vendor themselves, Red Hat are
planning to leverage their popular Linux distribution and
middleware solutions to jump on board the big data bandwagon.

In addition, the company says it is building a “robust network of
ecosystem and enterprise integration partners”, although who these
partners will be and how they will “allow users to integrate and
install comprehension enterprise big data solutions” is as yet
unclear.

Greg Kleiman, director of business strategy for Red Hat’s storage
business unit, told
The Register that they considered developing their own Hadoop
distribution, but decided not to “at the moment”.

“We are going to work through the existing Hadoop distributors,”
said Kleiman. “We are going to play the field and see what
happens.”

Red Hat Storage Server (previously known as Gluster before Red
Hat’s acquisition) can serve as a direct replacement for Hadoop’s
native HDFS, although the underlying technology has some
differences, particularly in its handling of nodes.

The open-source Hadoop plug-in will be submitted to the Apache
Software Foundation, allowing others to potentially integrate Red
Hat’s storage technology into their own distributions of Hadoop. In
addition, the company is working on a connector between Hive,
Hadoop’s data warehouse system, and its JBoss middleware.

In the accompanying press release, an IDC analyst is quoted as
saying that the big data market is likely to grow from “$6 billion
in 2011 to $23.8 billion in 2016” – so it’s no wonder that Red Hat
has finally made a move for a slice of the Hadoop-flavoured
pie.